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Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn) Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn) Author: Wendy Cannella Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/2161 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2011 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of English FIREPLACES: THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN MALE DOMESTIC POET (FROST, STEVENS, WILLIAMS, AND STEPHEN DUNN) A Dissertation by WENDY CANNELLA submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2011 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! "!!#$%&'()*+!,&!-./01!23//.443! 5677! Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn) ABSTRACT Wendy Cannella Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Paul Mariani The fireplace has long stood at the center of the American home, that hearth which requires work and duty and which offers warmth and transformation in return. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet takes a look at three major twentieth-century men whose poetry manifests anxieties about staying home to “keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby’s chariot turning,” as Wallace Stevens described it (L 246), during a time of great literary change when their peers were widely expatriating to Europe. Fireplaces considers contemporary poet Stephen Dunn as an inheritor of this mottled Modernist lineage of male lyric domesticity in the Northeastern United States, a tradition rattled by the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 after which Dunn leaves his wife and family home to remarry, thus razing the longstanding domestic frame of his poems. Ultimately Fireplaces leaves us with a question for twenty-first century verse—can a male poet still write about home? Or has the local domestic voice been supplanted at last by a placeless strain of lyric. Fireplaces: The Unmaking of the American Male Domestic Poet (Frost, Stevens, Williams, and Stephen Dunn) Wendy Cannella TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Part I: Radiant Gist: The American Fireplace ..........................................................1 Part II: Keeping the Fire-Place Burning:.................................................................16 The American Male Domestic Poet Chapter 1) The Inhabitable Ghost Houses of Robert Frost.......................................28 Chapter 2) Locating the Palm at the End of the Mind:..............................................65 A Contradiction of Place in Wallace Stevens Chapter 3) The Door Opens: William Carlos Williams...........................................133 and the Modern American Home Chapter 4) Dismantling the House: Stephen Dunn.................................................171 and The Destruction of the American Home Epilogue .........................................................................................................................268 ! i! Acknowledgments A vast thank you to the wonderful faculty and staff at Boston College who provided me for many years with a home away from home. The faculty and colleagues who have inspired my work are numerous and among others include—my teaching mentors Amy Boesky, Mary Crane, and Laura Tanner, who illustrated for me what thoughtful pedagogy can do for literature; my dear friends Alison Van Vort and Matthew Heitzman who remind me always of the importance of good, intimate conversation; Chris Wilson for his dogged guidance of any scholar in need, including myself on many occasions; Paula Mathieu for nurturing my earliest teaching efforts; Robert Stanton for his caring directorship. I wish to acknowledge, too, my many wise students who reminded me that the American lyric is a communal, not a didactic, creature. With enduring thankfulness to Stephen Dunn, who laughed at my first poems only when they were meant to be funny, and who taught me life and poetry are not too far apart. To my family a great debt of thanks for their indefatigable support, who saw to my education from its most literal infancy, and who inspired in me a life-long love of art and domesticity: Dewey, Michaelyn, Yvonne, Jesse, Sarah, and Taneil. And to my mother- and father-in-law for all of their help during the completion of this dissertation: Patricia and Stanley. In particular to this project, I am indebted to a great many librarians for their kind assistance: especially those at the Milne Special Collections & Archives at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and at the York Public Library in Maine for sharing a haven of quiet study. Fireplaces came to fruition mainly due to the tireless work of my committee for whom I am eternally thankful—the wise and generous mentorship of my committee chair Dr. Paul Mariani, the supportive encouragement and great sense of Dr. Suzanne Matson, and the unswerving editorial eye of Dr. Robert Kern. To my husband Brian Matthews goes my greatest gratitude, for his willingness to “keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby’s chariot turning” (Wallace Stevens) while I worked. And to my two lovely daughters, Dewey and Hollis, who tried their hardest to distract me every step of the way—thank you, for reminding me where poetry comes from, and how life demands that, for our best moments, we put down our books. ! ii! Introduction: Part I RADIANT GIST: THE AMERICAN FIREPLACE THE RADIANT FIREPLACE Perhaps American male poets have always aggrandized the powers of the common fireplace, revealing, as they do, old preoccupations with the gods. By the time William Carlos Williams wrote “Burning the Christmas Greens,” the Fireside Poets had made vital the American hearth, and Emerson had already exalted the fireplace’s real and abstracted radiance, its double function as a source of heat and a social gathering place where housemates sat “Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of Storm." John Greenleaf Whittier reinforced such radiance in his classic New England idyll “Snowbound,” a poem Vendler called “the quintessential poem of domesticity” in American literature (Part 99). But there are two epigraphs to “Snowbound,” and before Whittier evokes Emerson, he first reminds us of an ancient fireplace tended by fifteenth century occult philosopher Cornelius Agrippa, a fireplace in which the forces of good and evil wage war inside our very living space: As the Spirit of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our fire of Wood doth the same. Cor. Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, Book I, Ch. V. Fireplaces bear out an old dichotomy of light and dark. Their powers are linked to a cosmic power, Agrippa believes, capable of repelling dark spirits. As a source of light and heat—and in American history, means a thing of sheer survival—the fireplace takes little nudging to burst into the symbolic realm, 1 enlarging readily and almost literally to bear notions of transformation and divine protection. Through such enlargement, Whittier and Emerson’s beloved homesteads and their protective hearths fulfill Gaston Bachelard’s definition of the house as “an instrument with which to confront the cosmos.” “Come what may,” the French philosopher believed, “the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world” (46-47). Whittier speaks of just such an omnipotent force in “Snow-bound”: What matter how the night behaved? What matter how the north-wind raved? Blow high, blow low, not all its snow Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow. (19) The hearth provides a safe distance from the outside world and its ravings, both natural and criminal. Whittier’s glorification of the nineteenth century “hearth-fire” struck a chord with Americans in the wake of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, quickly selling 20,000 copies upon publication. Nor has the poem, largely unknown by the American public today, been wholly forgotten in the Northeast region of the United States where the house to which the poem is dedicated still stands in Haverhill, Massachusetts (“To the Memory of the Household It Describes This Poem is Dedicated by the Author,” Whittier had inscribed his poem, a work recently performed in Portland, Maine as a one- act play (‘Snowbound’). LAMPS UNLIGHTED AND FIRE GONE GRAY Like Whittier, Robert Frost will come to handle the home as a site of struggle between light and dark. For Frost, however, the darkness often wins, 2 conquered only potentially by the poetic imagination. In “House Fear,” the second section of “The Hill Wife” in Mountain Interval, the fire dies and the house, consumed by darkness, fills with “whatever might chance to be,” a twentieth century version of Agrippa’s “dark spirits”: Always—I tell you this they learned— Always at night when they returned To the lonely house from far away To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray, They learned to rattle the lock and key To give whatever might chance to be Warning and time to be off in flight: And preferring the out- to the in-door night, They learned to leave the house-door wide Until they had lit the lamp inside. (123) In Frost’s handling of the superstitious “hill wife,” the human imagination grows severe,
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